Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence by Vikram Mansharamani. Vikram was a Lecturer at Harvard University and also previously lectured at Yale University.
He holds a Ph.D. and Masters from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a Masters in Political Science also from MIT. He holds a BA from Yale University.
In our AI world Vikram pushes the pause button, for good reason. We have lost the ability to think for ourselves. He provides solid examples of AI gone wrong. As indicated the bookcover of a car driving into a river is a true story.
On the island of Sardinia, the town began erecting signs “Do not follow the directions of Google Maps.” 144 drivers were requesting ‘rescue’ services. As a result of blindly following the AI mapping application.
The message is also that we must question AI. In fact, we must outright challenge the so called experts, their products, and how they position their services. While it may work for one service, it will certainly not work for all.
Vikram rightfully calls out the so called experts. They live in their bubble and fail to consider the wider impacts across our world, results can even include death.
Ignore at your personal risk
In fact, Vikram outlines how several complex services generating enormous amounts of data has placed trust with those experts and their AI technology services. Perhaps the beginning also reveals a perfect blind trust: during the peak of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, a man recently returned from West Africa with a fever and severe abdominal pain. After an admission to a Dallas area hospital, the patient was sent home. Even after healthcare workers learned their patient had come from Liberia, ground zero of the Ebola hot zone, not one of those treating him considered the deadly virus as a possible cause of his condition. Shortly after the man died.
As stunning as this sounds, a nurses who had treated the man sought clearance from the CDC to board a commercial flight. Yet, after reporting a fever of 99.5 degrees, but because the protocol restricted travel at 100.4 degrees or higher, she was allowed to travel and was later confirmed to be infected with Ebola. This is also addressed in Erik Larson’s book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence and Gary Smith’s book The AI Delusion:
Chart a new path?
The take away message is we need to quickly install a review for the integration of AI systems, to be more efficient versus the rush it to the market we live in today.
In conclusion, Think for Yourself is indispensable to show how we must place ourselves back in the drivers seat and question AI’s self-reliant thinking in our fast changing world where all markets are fully embracing AI.